Big Money Hides Behind a Noble Front

It was Sigmund Freud, I believe - or maybe Mussolini, or Nietzsche - who once observed, "Many enemies, much honor." If that is the case, the staff of this magazine ought to be candidates for a Nobel Prize, because we never lack for enemies, be they angry readers, disgruntled advertisers, manufacturers who believe their products have been slighted or slandered, and, of course, our arch adversaries on the loony left who represent themselves as the protectors of all lumpenproles in the realm of automobile safety.

My most recent dust-up came during a spiky interlude on MSNBC/CNBC's The News with Brian Williams. I faced off with Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, an organization whose apparent mission is to convince the nation that the bloated tycoons who build passenger cars have a secret agenda to murder their customers. Odd as this may sound, Claybrook and her gauleiters receive reverential treatment among the elite media (NASCAR nut Williams notably excepted) for their bizarre theories, which means the Flat Earth Society and the wackos from PETA ought to be regularly hosted on Meet the Press and other Sunday forums for the chattering classes.

The confrontation between myself and Claybrook involved a new study by a pair of Rutgers University economics professors of U.S. vehicle fatalities from 1994 through 1997. Their findings, published in the Cato Institute's journal Regulation, produced the revelation that rather than behaving like highway predators, light trucks and SUVs have actually enhanced highway safety. Their conclusions, backed by extensive data, state flatly that the stronger, heavier vehicles reduced single-vehicle fatalities per driver by 7.5 percent and multiple vehicle fatalities per driver by 2.0 percent. This resulted in 2000 lives saved over the four-year span of study.

The academicians, Douglas Coate and James VanderHoff, note that there has been a 50-percent decline in traffic fatalities per mile over the past two decades while light trucks and SUV registrations have doubled over the same time span. The conclusion is irrefutable - these larger, tougher vehicles have contributed to vehicle safety, like it or not.

Claybrook hates it. During our brief encounter, she denounced Coate and VanderHoff's findings as "poppycock" based on bogus computer modeling while noting that my defense of the study may have been due to head injuries suffered in too many SUV rollovers. I countered, of course - maintaining my widely known penchant for understatement and restraint - that perhaps the profs employed the same computers that permitted her and her fellow quacks to hysterically claim that undoing the 55-mph national speed limit would produce 6400 or more additional highway deaths annually and that her beloved airbags posed no threat to small children. You will recall that during her tenure as NHTSA administrator, 1977-81, and as head of the Nader-founded Public Citizen, Claybrook trumpeted the benefits of airbags and then ran for cover when tiny tots began to be decapitated by the devices.

It is likely that the Coate/VanderHoff study will be ignored by most of the mainstream media, which has, thanks to a traditional antibusiness, left-wing tilt, permitted the Safety Nazis to endlessly spew their nonsense to the general public. The New York Times ("All the news that's fit to print"), Dateline NBC (firebombing pickups a specialty), and other major media eagerly disseminate the opinions of these charlatans despite the fact that over the past three decades they have been patently wrong in their support of ignition interlocks (useless and infuriating), automatic shoulder belts (lethal when employed without lap belts), the 55-mph speed limit (universally ignored and discredited), high-mounted brake lights and anti-lock brakes (both unproved as reducing accidents), the airbag, and the idiotic demand that all of Bridgestone/Firestone's inventory, apparently including the rubber bands found in desk drawers, be banned forever and that Ford Explorers be hauled off en masse to the crusher.